Michael Ignatieff, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics
(Random House, 2013).

Review by Allan R. Gregg originally published in Policy Options via IRPP.org

Full disclosure: I have always liked and admired Michael Ignatieff. Before he returned to Canada in 2005 to run as the Liberal candidate in Etobicoke-Lakeshore with his not-so-secret plan to run for the party’s leadership, I felt he was probably Canada’s finest public intellectual. His book and television series Blood and Belonging was one of the most penetrating and useful analyses of the forces that precipitated the devolution of state-to-state warfare into ethnocultural conflict that have ever been penned.

His defence of the decision to invade Iraq — while discredited as time passed — was elegant and provided a sweeping historical and geopolitical context that was never present in the triumphalist exhortations of other supporters. And while it was often cited out of context, his parsing of concepts such as a “moral war” and the lines between justifiable and illegal state use of force in his book The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror made it absolutely clear that you were reading the works of a superior mind.

He had held academic postings at Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford. He had been on the cover of GQ magazine. The British press had labelled him “the thinking woman’s crumpet.”

In sum, he was the total package. It was small wonder then that the three so-called “men in black” who came to visit him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2004 would see him as the ideal candidate to lead Canada’s natural governing party past its sponsorship-scandal muddle back to glory. Given his pedigree, his accomplishments and the accolades he had received throughout his career, the man himself could be forgiven for agreeing with them.
(more…)